“Managing is going to persuade people to do things they really do not want to do, while leading is going to inspire people to do things they had never thought they could do.” – Steve Jobs
Today there is a constant change, and for that reason and few doubt that innovation becomes a necessity for companies, and is key to its development and growth.
When we talk about innovation, we are not talking about millionaire investments in R & D, we are talking about the ability of people to develop new proposals and promote changes that result in better results.
The ingredients of entrepreneurship are creativity, initiative and action. An entrepreneur generates ideas, which he initiates by initiative, and creates a sequence of actions to turn them into business opportunities. But possibly not every entrepreneur has the ability to lead. A leader is something more than an entrepreneur: a leader has a vocation for transformation, ability to provoke change, vision of the future (in many cases, idealistic or utopian), and emotional energy to mobilize teams and influence people. A leader possesses three key skills (the three “Cs”: conceptualize, communicate and convince).
Innovation and leadership, on the other hand, are two sides of the same coin: you can not innovate (change) anything without leadership, and you can not lead anything that is not in motion.
Innovation and leadership, on the other hand, are two sides of the same coin: you can not innovate (change) anything without leadership, and you can not lead anything that is not in motion.
Every leader is an entrepreneur, but not every entrepreneur is a leader. It is not the entrepreneur who enjoys uncertainty, it is the leader who carries within who really does it. We need leading citizens, not just entrepreneurs.
The American gold medalist jumping in the Olympic Winter Games in Nagano, Japan, Nikki Stone makes reference to the phrase of John Burroughs, “Salta and the network will appear”. She recounts her experience in these Games in Japan …. “I put that concept to the test during my second World Cup competition abroad. The fog moved and we could see ten meters in front of us. Nobody wanted to disappoint the Japanese organizers, who were new to the circuit, so instead of saying, “Why do not we cancel the event?”, The officials went to the next best “reasonable” response: “We simply we will stay. ” It was the women’s contest. “Being new to the circuit, I was hardly in a position to protest.
I made my way to the entrance with the rest of the female skiers. As we prepared to take our first practice jumps, I turned to the other women and asked, “How do we do this if we can not even see the jump?”
Again, the answer was not the one I was very happy about. “Do not worry, you can see the jump just before you reach it,” replied a Norwegian woman.
I nodded and smiled weakly. One by one, the athletes disappeared in the fog and we heard someone shouting at us: “Jump, of course!”. Before I knew it, it was my turn to venture into the sea of fog.
Sure enough, when he was less than twenty-five feet from the jump, I could see his red lines painted with spray. I moved my arms and threw myself into a cloudy abyss. It was a terrifying experience, but valuable, two hours later I had won my first World Cup competition “….
Indeed, many great entrepreneurs have triumphed because they have dared to make the leap and a network appeared. They risked where others were paralyzed by the analysis.
The engine of success does not lie in the idea that the entrepreneur has, it is in the capacities of transformation of reality. It is the continuous initiative and the self-confidence of the entrepreneur, his tenacity, flexibility and vision, his enthusiasm and passion that lead him to success. These attributes unconsciously weave the safety net, in any leap into the void. And they are attributes of leadership, not entrepreneurship.
Leadership for Innovation
For effective innovation leadership, three pillars, tools, skills and mentality are required. The place where these 3 pillars converge is where it gives way to innovation in the company.
- Some tools that can be used are Brainstorming, Mind Mapping, Prototyping, Design Thinking, etc. All these tools can be learned through workshops designed to know and implement them as needed.
- A framework that allows innovation, that there is space for collaborators to use their skills and knowledge to achieve their objectives. Facilitate the practice to generate mastery in the tools and techniques offered.
- It is important to permeate at all levels of an organization leadership skills for innovation, from collaborators to management.
- The mentality is the fundamental operating system of the creative thinker that allows to distinguish the leaders that foster creativity and innovation, from those that hinder it.
To promote the innovative mentality we must promote curiosity, focus on the client, be intuitive, embrace many possibilities, know that you can always find creative solutions to problems, etc.
So, an innovative leader is characterized by:
They present convincing narratives. Leaders with great capacity for transformation understand the power of a well told story. They do not stay in the past, but they do appreciate the importance of linking the legacy of their company with the desired future state, presenting the current challenges of the company as a bridge between both.
They build a collective leadership capacity. However intelligent, successful or charismatic they may be, transforming leaders know that they will only achieve their goals if they create a relationship of mutual responsibility and share a sense of belonging about the future challenges of the company.
They implement processes that will drive innovation and growth. New business technologies have led companies around the world to recognize that they are no longer used simply for business process flows, reducing operational costs and increasing sales. These latest innovations are overcoming the limits and have become an imperative aspect to boost business growth.
Create coherence between the promises made and the indicators and rewards. The biggest danger that threatens a company’s ability to support a major transformation in its business model is a lack of trust among employees about whether the CEO and the management team really have the courage to complete this process with success.
They build dynamic talent factories. A company that has a dynamic and future-oriented talent acquisition strategy will have an engine for its growth, revitalization and renewal. This talent strategy will include discovering what capabilities we need in a turbulent economic environment. This strategy will ensure that the culture and climate of the company are inclusive, collaborative and high performance.
New executives must learn to resolve tensions in the company, dominating a series of dualities that suppose a conflict, but also a complementarity: urgency and patience; collective and individual responsibility; the role of mentor and the encouragement of performance; be a student and teacher; humility and audacity. Leaders capable of mastering these dualities will be well equipped to build organizations that move towards a goal, achieving new successes in a constantly changing business environment.
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